Deputy Chief Minister and Minister for Capital Metro Simon Corbell writes:
CANBERRA is growing. By 2031 our city will be close to half a million residents.
By the middle of the century, there will be 600,000 Canberrans calling our city home. This change will happen within my lifetime, as it will within the lifetimes of many Canberrans. How we plan and develop infrastructure now to meet the demands of this growth will determine our future quality of life, particularly in areas such as transport, congestion and housing.
Where will these extra 220,000 Canberrans over the next 35 years live?
Currently there are 26,000 dwelling sites left in our greenfield land supply. At an annual population growth rate of 1.6 per cent, and annual greenfield demand of 1,600 dwellings, this supply is exhausted in just 17 years.
More people will need to, and want to be, accommodated in existing urban areas, closer to our commercial centres, to shops, cafes, offices, cultural and recreational facilities. These Canberrans, future ratepayers and property owners, will want and expect good transport infrastructure capable of moving large numbers of people efficiently. They will expect to be less reliant on the car for all of their journeys, they will want good public transport and to be able to combine walking and cycling to get around.
By 2031 Gungahlin will the second largest district in Canberra by population, at 86,000 people, only Belconnen will be bigger at 96,000. North Canberra will also grow, another 17,500 people moving into the inner north, matching Gungahlin’s growth rate of 1.8% annually.
This is where the population growth is happening in Canberra, and it is the growth corridor where it will continue to happen. It is why this is the corridor chosen for the first stage of the Capital Metro light rail network.
Many who speak against light rail aren’t planning for this future, or anticipating what infrastructure our city will need. This short-term thinking is unable to imagine a Canberra of a new size and scale which will be realised within our lifetimes.
Only relying on greenfield land release to meet our housing needs will place even more pressure on the beautiful Red Gum / Yellow Box grassy woodlands, which have been served up as our suburban land supply ever since our city was established. With less than 5% of this critically endangered ecosystem surviving nationally, and its protection now required under both Commonwealth and ACT environmental law, the prospects of continuing to rely on it for housing are tenuous.
It is critical we imagine and plan for a growing Canberra. The consequences of not doing so are costly, in time, lost productivity, a degraded quality of life and environment and to the ACT budget.
Business as usual for Northbourne Avenue means an average morning peak hour journey time in 2031 of 57 minutes for the 12km drive from Gungahlin to the City, and longer to the Parliamentary Triangle and Russell.
Capital Metro is a response to this growing congestion, which citywide is projected to cost the ACT economy $700 million annually by 2031, according to a report by Infrastructure Australia. The IA report highlights Northbourne Avenue in particular as the transport corridor of major concern, due to the predicted growth in population in Gungahlin and north Canberra. Not even electric, or driverless cars, will be a solution to the costs of congestion.
The short term response is to say buses can fix this problem, but to be effective buses will require priority over cars along this corridor too. A dedicated bus lane, northbound and southbound, will be needed. This means removing two existing traffic lanes, compounding congestion problems during the morning peak, or using the Northbourne median for a two-lane bus road.
Light rail has much greater ability to integrate into a landscape setting than a bus road can, and the landscape quality of Northbourne Avenue is a key consideration for works approval from the National Capital Authority. The impact on trees of constructing a two-lane bus road in the median should also be obvious to those who oppose Capital Metro on these grounds.
Buses will carry at most 100 people if they are articulated, light rail more than double this amount. Light rail has a long-term growth capacity to meet passenger demand many decades into the future.
Currently there are more than 8500 public transport journeys every day along Northbourne Avenue. By 2021, following the introduction of light rail, patronage is predicted to be almost double, at 15,000 daily, while by 2031 patronage is predicted to be over 20,000 every day. If Capital Metro is extended to connect the City to Russell patronage would be boosted by an additional 30 per cent.
Carrying capacity, maintaining the landscape quality of Northbourne Avenue and encouraging more people to use public transport are key reasons why the 2012 URS report on bus rapid transit and light rail options for the Gungahlin to
City corridor concluded that “LRT (light rail transit) generates the best overall outcome for Canberra.”
Developing Capital Metro is a long-term investment in response to long-term population growth. Once established a light rail network can easily grow over time. With operational vehicles, maintenance facilities and contractors in place it is straightforward to expand, as has been the experience with the
Adelaide light rail project. Some argue that Canberra is too small for a light rail network, yet cities the same size as Canberra, for example in France Nice and Valenciennes with populations of 350,000 and 400,000 respectively, or in Freiburg, Germany, with 220,000 residents, all have modern city wide light rail networks developed in the last few decades.
It also makes sense to finance the project with a long-term repayment structure. A Public Private Partnership achieves two aims. It largely ensures that the risk of construction cost ‘blow outs’ is transferred to and managed by the private sector rather than the ACT budget. A PPP also means there is no upfront construction cost to the ACT taxpayer, the PPP consortia receives a regular payment only after the project is operational.
The payment term of 20-25 years ensures costs are equitably shared during the period that population growth, and demand for public transport services, is projected to occur. Future residents will share the costs and benefits of this long-term investment, ensuring current residents do not shoulder all of the costs alone.
The benefits of Capital Metro do not solely accrue to those who will live in the growth corridor. Setting aside the capacity to extend the light rail network over time, the economic benefits of the project are significant with $1 billion of economic benefit across the ACT economy.
Capital Metro’s benefit cost ratio of 1.2 is strong for an urban rail project. The recently completed Dulwich Hill light rail extension in Sydney had a benefit cost ratio of only 1, the North West rail link, partly funded by Infrastructure Australia, just 1.05. The broader opportunities for improved productivity, less time wasted in traffic, improved land values and more investment in knowledge-based innovation industries (that thrive in walkable, connected, transit oriented cities) are significant economic benefits of Capital Metro.
There is also the support for 3,500 jobs during construction – helping small and medium businesses, plumbers, bricklayers, concreters and formworkers, engineers and electricians, designers and landscapers, all of whom will spend their pay packets in Canberra shops and services, delivering short and long-term benefits to the ACT economy. The BCR is also a very conservative estimate. If the guidelines for benefit cost analysis used by the UK Government were applied (where PPP procurement has been in place for a longer period than Australia), Capital Metro would achieve a BCR of 1.7.
Short-term thinking would say the estimated construction cost of $610 million plus a contingency of $173 million is unaffordable, yet this fails to see the broader budget picture. In the last decade, the ACT Government has spent more than $1 billion on roads. In the last four years, $955 million has been provided for health, education and community infrastructure. The availability payments for Capital Metro, once they start, will only be a very small percentage of the ACT budget, a percentage that will continue to diminish over time.
Estimates produced by ACT’s Environment and Planning Directorate indicate that to maintain the existing level of service for motorists just for the North Canberra road network without light rail would require 8 additional lanes of road across the road network at a cost of $250 million. This would be in addition to already projected road infrastructure upgrades worth $300 million over the next 5-10 years. The cost of additional road capacity across all of Canberra, will be higher still.
Short-term thinking and our collective ignorance of the enormous costs of new road infrastructure prevents us from imagining better, more productive and sustainable ways of investing in transport for a growing Canberra, and of realising it is within our grasp.
In 2050 I will turn 80, my children will be the age I am today, and Canberra will be over half a million strong. Looking back, will we see the debates over Capital Metro as the turning point? When we realised that growth and development could be accommodated in an affordable way, more sustainably with more people living close to Civic and our other centres, with easy access to regular, fast, smooth light rail transit connecting us to active, prosperous, and people focused places? Whilst I cannot know these answers today, I do know that it is the future I must strive for, because planning for the needs of a growing population, creating better places to live, improving the urban and protecting the natural environment, creating jobs and economic opportunity, is what governments are expected to do.
Simon Corbell MLA is Deputy Chief Minister and Minister for Capital Metro.
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